Priscilla Sheeran

Priscilla Sheeran has been a long time member of the Norwood community and the principal of Public School 56, E 207^th street & Decatur Avenue, since 1991. Sheeran has been a proud member of P.S. 56 since 1991, the year she started as an english teacher there. During the course of her near 23 year tenure, Priscilla has witnessed many of the educational problems Norwood has undergone. What was most notable to her was the increasing overcrowding of her school as well as other public schools within Norwood (P.S. 280, P.S. 94, P.S. 20).

Norwood boasts an incredible amount of public grade schools, private charter schools and after school institutes. For such a small area Norwood manages to house a total of 13 schools, not including after school institutes and day care centers. Of that number, five are public schools, two are charter, and six are private. What is surprising is that Mrs. Sheeran still finds herself running a school operating at 116% capacity. While working at the school in 1995, she witnessed a period of unusually high overcrowding. Students had to be bussed to nearby schools, as they simply couldn’t handle the influx.

P.S. 56 is now facing a related but even tougher challenge. Sheeran explained that most of the students, children of immigrants or those speaking a language other than English, “technically require ESL classes”. The problem is however that the school only has two ESL classes – bulging to capacity at over 50 students each. She says the classes prevent exactly what they were designed to do: offer small classes with individual attention to students.

Many of the other schools in the area, P.S. 280, P.S. 94, P.S. 20, are dealing with the same problem. When asked why, she believes that the schools never accommodated for the changing demographics within the community. “When I first started working here (P.S. 56) in 1991, the school was dominated by the Irish. I don’t even think we knew what an ESL class was at the time.” Although she’s noticed that the Irish have been long gone, she says the education system hasn’t seemed to realize that.  Sheeran says it is hard to offer more ESL classes when they must first bring in qualified instructors under a razor thin budget. The Parent-Teacher Association within the school continually pushes for additional classes. What I found interesting is that she noted that the charter schools have restructured their programs quicker and better than the public schools in Norwood. Only a few blocks away Bronx Community Charter School, serving only half as many students as P.S. 56, has a total of five ESL classes with just about 15 students in each. “Their ELA scores (the charter school) have consistently beaten ours because of that” said Sheeran. Not only do lower standardized test scores look worse on paper, but they also play a key factor when evaluating teachers at a school she says. “The scores we receive aren’t necessarily reflective of the teacher’s and schools ability for that matter when the problem is simply that we are spread too thin”. Another topic she noted was that the charter school ends 45 minutes later than P.S. 56 – at 4:00PM instead of 3:15 like neighboring public schools. Those last 45 minutes let the students pursue anything they wish from building block structures to assembling simple electronics.

There is something to learn in the difference of how the two schools choose to spend their money. Both schools are after all funded by the city however they seemed to have adapted differently to the current needs. That being an increased focus on language learning and classroom size. When I asked what she believed the reason for the influx was she couldn’t say for sure. Her outward reason was that Norwood physically houses larger families and more of them. But she also thinks that neighboring districts are sending their kids, as the environment is more in line with what they want: an established faculty. What Sheeran was most proud of is the low turnover rate of teachers at her school compared with benchmark numbers. The average public school is lucky to keep a teacher, on average, two years. She says most of her educators have passed that mark years ago. When I was in middle school, the most important thing to us was having teachers that knew the neighborhood and the way students worked there.